Note 114 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION

The quotations are from a note by Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson on his translation of the Historia animalium, III, 3. The note gives so good a glimpse of both the merits and defects of the Aristotelian text as it has reached us that I will quote it here more fully:

“The Aristotelian account of the vascular system is remarkable for its wealth of details, for its great accuracy in many particulars, and for its extreme obscurity in others. It is so far true to nature that it is clear evidence of minute inquiry, but here and there so remote from fact as to suggest that things once seen have been half forgotten, or that superstition was in conflict with the result of observation. The account of the vessels connecting the left arm with the liver and the right with the spleen ... is a surviving example of mystical or superstitious belief. It is possible that the ascription of three chambers to the heart was also influenced by tradition or mysticism, much in the same way as Plato’s notion of the three corporeal faculties.”